When Everything Is the Cloud, Will Nothing Be the Cloud?

Organizations worldwide are eyeing their existing data centers and wondering what it would take to turn them (or some part of them) into Private Clouds. Install virtualization? Check. Are we a Private Cloud yet?

Nope (sorry to burst your bubble on this one). OK, then, what else?

A Cloud orchestration platform like OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Check.

Automated provisioning, configuration, and management, using a Toolchain based on Chef, Puppet, and associated tools. Check.

Add a liberal dose of governance: operational policies that support the elasticity, automated metering, user provisioning, and other essential Cloud characteristics. Check.

Are we there yet?

Maybe. You may have overlooked some odds and ends, and you need to make sure you start with the appropriate equipment. But yes, the list above mostly covers what it takes to build a Private Cloud.

OK, jump five (or ten?) years into the future. Your mission on this day is to build out an on-premise data center. There is no particular requirement to make it a Private Cloud. What's the best approach?

On the list:

Virtualization

Cloud orchestration

Automated provisioning, configuration and management.

Once these tools and technologies mature, there will be no reason whatsoever to build out a data center as anything but a Cloud.

At that point, all modern data centers will be Clouds. Once we get there, will we even need to talk about Cloud Computing? Or will we just call it…computing?